When The New Yorker’s Wolcott Gibbs founded the Fire Islander, he laid out a concise mission for the summertime weekly on Long Island: “Our reporters will be instructed to get around. There are usually twenty little communities in any community. It will be their job every week to get in touch with a representative member of each of them and come back with the facts, upon which the editors will then superimpose grammar.” The citation is from Thomas Vinciguerra’s deft introduction to his big collection of Gibbs pieces, Backward Ran Sentences.

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If you’re concerned about utility companies using pesticides to control vegetation along their rights of way, Neil Andres has got your goat. Four of them, in fact, that the Eastham DPW director has set to munching old Christmas trees as he prepares to negotiate about using them under the wires. The Cape Codder’sMarilyn Miller had fun quoting selectmen’s questions to Andres, such as, “Is there any chance of goat multiplication?” “Supposedly they are all females,” came the reply, “but one of them has horns.”

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Retired Brewster fire chief Roy Jones speaks his mind, most often as a persistent advocate for restoring rail service on the Cape. His direct manner came to light in another arena when, as a consultant, he delivered what the Provincetown Banner called a “damning report, calling the Truro Fire & Rescue Dept. ‘a rudderless boat floating in Cape Cod Bay.’” Axe the board of fire engineers, Jones advised, and prepare for leadership by a chief.

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Cat span: An Upper Cape man coaxed a cat off the outer railing of the Sagamore Bridge as 2011 came to an end, the Bourne Enterprise reported. The new year brought a new name – Bridget – and an early adoption for the fortunate feline.

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Back in the day, The Cape Codder had a regular column by a poet. It was overseen by Cecil Lubell, whose wife, artist Winifred Lubell, died Jan. 3 in Provincetown. The Boston Globe noted that Mr. Lubell was “an Englishman and Harvard graduate who became a consultant to the textile industry.” Mrs. Lubell, “a politically radical graphic artist,” taught herself ancient Greek in her 70s, according to the Globe. The Lubells [he died in 2000] lived in Wellfleet, where both contributed to the unique flavor of that community.

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The Enterprise reported that a Falmouth summer resident who had a home built based on a picture he saw on the Internet discovered that his model was the Grey Gardens mansion on Long Island. The New York residence was home to an eccentric mother and sister, related to Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, who were featured in a notable 1975 documentary. Turns out, though, that the house the man saw on the Internet was not the original but one built for an HBO special in more recent years. The actual Grey Gardens was purchased and rehabilitated by two newspaper people: Washington Post editor Ben Bradlee and feature writer Sally Quinn. The Falmouth version is for sale at $3.195 million.

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Should Provincetown leapfrog the nearer Nauset Regional High School and send its teens to the new Monomoy district that unites Chatham and Harwich? “They are more like us in a lot of ways than Nauset is,” Provincetown Supt. Beth Singer told the Banner. “They’re small, intimate schools.” She noted that, without a local high school sports program, Provincetown junior Michelle Silva is playing basketball for Chatham.

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The way older Americans have to fight for their rights is enough to make some people SCREAM, and that’s what has happened in Provincetown. The Banner reports that Paul Mendes has formed Senior Citizens Requesting Economic Adjustment Measures to make sure officials consider the elderly who cannot attend town meeting when they make decisions. Those elders do make it to the polls, however, and Mendes would put most money matters on the ballot.

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As the salesmen sing in The Music Man, “you gotta know the territory.” Fortunately for The Falmouth Enterprise, columnist Troy Clarkson does. Last month, he created a clutch of “additions to our local lexicon” based on the names and doings of fellow citizens. Activist Paul Rifkin gets a nod with “Doing the Rifkin – to practice free speech and civil, polite protest on a regular basis.”

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The “largest solar project on the Outer Cape” includes 1,440 solar panels on town land in Brewster, according to The Cape Codder. The installer is My Generation Energy, which recently received the Cape Cod Commission’s approval of its plans for an array at the Cape & Islands Steel site next to Barnstable Municipal Airport.

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Good news for fans of the Nickelodeon Cinemas way out there in East Falmouth. The Enterprise reported that a retired doctor would step up, if Regal Cinemas sold the property, and maintain it as a venue for art films, though his first preference was that Regal continue to operate the business. Performing a miracle of its own, the Enterprise actually heard from a Regal rep, who said the company has taken the property off the market.

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Did you know there’s a Peyton Place in Falmouth?

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Cape Codder columnist Dana Eldridge has given his great-great-grandfather’s Civil War diary to the Harwich Historical Society. Eldridge’s book, A Cape Cod Kinship: Two Centuries, Two Wars, Two Men tells the stories of Ebenezer Smalley’s service in the Civil War and his own in the Korean War.

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Laurie Balliett, whose byline is familiar to readers of our Arts section, now writes for the local Gatehouse newspapers.That’s where she filed her first-hand account of helping to rescue some of the 59 dolphins that stranded between Dennis and Wellfleet last month. The work, accomplished wearing waders or wetsuits, isn’t easy. “I work out daily and this is the hardest workout I can remember,” Balliett wrote.

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We doubt that the people of a certain Cape town are ethically lax, even though their local paper referred in a headline to their “Principle Planner.” Remember, “The principal is your pal.”

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Think the Great Recession is over? The Cape Cod Chronicle says The Family Pantry in Harwich is feeding about 2,500 people a month. “We simply could not operate without the strength of our beloved volunteers,” said executive director Mary Anderson. The Pantry has a staggering number of helpers, but, as the paper noted, “even with 300 volunteers the Pantry is always looking for a few more.”

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We don’t like kids, and neither does Richard Olson of Provincetown. Don’t get us wrong; children are fine. In a letter to the Banner, Olson complained that “the word ‘kids’ is used by education professionals and others in referring to our high school students. These are young adults, for heaven’s sake, not young goats.”

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Uniform mania struck Falmouth Public Schools’ Lawrence School and has spread next door to Mashpee where, the Enterprise informs us, there’s an on-line parent survey about requiring uniform attire. The mother of a fourth grader wrote to the paper protesting the idea, suggesting it was tantamount to “putting a label” on students. “If the administration feels this is such a good idea,” she wrote, “maybe they should try it and honestly tell us how productive and creative they feel at the end of the day.”

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Eastham builder Nate Nickerson, who owns Arnold’s Clam and Lobster Bar, believes in turnips, especially the vaunted Eastham variety. The Cape Codder reports that he wants the town to let him farm a turnip patch on one of the 10 acres of municipal land reserved for a senior housing development. He would donate any profits to a local charity.

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We’d suggest folks who believe that, as one told The Mashpee Enterprise, “The town is Mashpee Commons,” dig a little deeper into the community’s history and Native American heritage. The speaker wants to move town hall to a location near the Commons and create a network of town-owned recreation land around the development.

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Provincetown’s Barbara Rushmore is known for sharing her strong opinions at Town Meeting and in the pages of the Banner. Last month, she took on the National Park Service for what she described as steps to block the view of the ocean from the Race Point and Herring Cove parking lots. “The National Park Service loves Yellowstone and the western national parks,” she wrote to the local paper. “That’s why we have split-rail fences and huge rocks, trucked in at huge cost to make our 100 percent sand-spit heaven on earth look like someplace else.”

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We’re sure that a Cape weekly didn’t intend a double meaning when it headlined a story “Fence could be ahead for auto body shop.”

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Three hundred years is a big deal, but not if your people have been around for 10,000. That’s how The Cape Cod Chronicle’s Alan Pollock reported that the Chatham Wampanoag Circle is getting the word out that “we still live here,” according to chair Jill James. The group will be a presence as the town celebrates its tercentennial; a guide to sites, “Chatham Monomoyick Trail,” is in the works.

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One of the big newspaper chains ran a job ad for an advertising director “based in Cape Cod, MA.” Must be for an underground newspaper. ON that note, we’ll close.